One of the highlights of this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films, Jonas Bak’s strong feature film debut Wood and Water stars his own mother, Anke. Shot on 16mm in both the director’s native Germany and Hong Kong, where Bak is currently based, Wood and Water follows Anke in the immediate days following her retirement. When she leaves her small town to visit her long-gone son in Hong Kong, Anke finds herself adjacent to the protests unfolding there. With a keen compositional eye, palpable warmth towards all the strangers she meets and the occasional musical assist from Brian Eno’s New Space Music, Wood and […]

A world premiere I’m highly anticipating out of the upcoming 2021 edition of New Directors/New Films is the second feature from Iva Radivojević, Aleph. From New Directors: In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends […]